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Grape Fruit
To have the fruit cold and in excellent condition place them in the ice box during the night. Cut three of them in halves, crosswise; remove the pits and cores, after which run the knife around between the peel and the fruit, just to separate it, then make about six cuts from the centre, so that it may be easily removed with the spoon. Serve them with powdered sugar.
A serving method rather than a cooked dish, and nearly all of it still holds. The differences are in the fruit itself and in what "powdered sugar" meant.
- YieldThree grapefruit cut crosswise gives six halves, one per person as a breakfast or first course. Scale by the half.
- Ice boxOvernight in the refrigerator. Grapefruit is markedly better cold, which is exactly the reason given here.
- "Pits and cores"The seeds and the tough white column of pith at the centre. Turn-of-the-century grapefruit were mostly seedy varieties such as Duncan; a modern Marsh or Ruby Red will have few seeds or none, and the core lifts out with the tip of a paring knife.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Superfine dissolves into the juice without clouding it.
- How much sugarNineteenth-century grapefruit ran sharper and more bitter than the sweet pink cultivars that dominate today. Taste before sugaring; a Ruby Red often needs nothing at all.
- The cutsFree the flesh from the peel all the way round first, then make the radial cuts along the membranes rather than through the middle of each section. Done in that order the segments come out whole on the spoon instead of shredding.
- ToolsA serrated grapefruit spoon or a small curved knife does the separating in a few seconds; a straight paring knife works but tears more.
- A modern noteGrapefruit and its juice interfere with a long list of prescription drugs, statins among them. Worth knowing before serving it as a standing breakfast course.
Grapefruit is a hybrid of the sweet orange and the pomelo, generally traced to Barbados in the eighteenth century, where it was recorded under the name "forbidden fruit". The present name is usually explained by the way the fruit hangs in clusters, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. It was a late arrival at the table: commercial groves in Florida made it widely available in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, with the Texas industry following in the early twentieth, and it entered American and European dining first as a fashionable hotel breakfast opener and a light first course at dinner.